


King Under the Mountain: Being the Eighteenth Tale of the Coin, the Sword and the Medallion

by LooNEY_DAC



Series: The Medallion [2]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, That would be telling - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-04
Updated: 2018-11-06
Packaged: 2019-08-17 17:19:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 6,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16520699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LooNEY_DAC/pseuds/LooNEY_DAC
Summary: The Young Protector visits another place in the world of the Realm, with new challenges and dangers to face.





	1. Picking Up and Packing Up

The wind rose to a near-deafening howl outside, and pitch-blackness enveloped the Garage when the electricity suddenly failed. Just then, a blinding flash of lightning streaked jaggedly across the sky, followed almost immediately by a clap of thunder whose echoes almost drowned out the sound of the incredible downpour outside, the raging gale lashing Uncle Fixit’s house with the already heavy sheets of rain.

This was the third time I’d been in the Garage when it was storming outside; as on both prior times I had been sent forth into the Realm, I wondered now whether a similar fate awaited me this time. The possibility struck me as ironic, given that I had just come from the Realm in order to tidy up some unfinished business here before going back for what I was sure would be a protracted campaign to Protect the Realm.

Uncle Fixit and the rest of my immediate family are dead; they died in a plane crash several years ago. As I was underage at the time, my only living relative, a distant cousin, was made my trustee; he embezzled every cent he could squeeze out of the trust, fled to South America, and died there.

The Garage, and the rest of the property with it, now belonged to the Consolidated Big Exotic Machine Works, the place co-founded by the man who’d built the Garage, and where my Uncle Fixit had worked while he’d been alive. It had come to their attention that there might be certain personal items of sentimental value which I might like to have before the property was cleared out and developed as a nice, new suburban neighborhood for the Works’ workforce, so I was being given this brief opportunity to go through all of it.

More or less everything in the Garage was going into the R&D section of the Works to be analyzed and examined, as most of the stuff had been Works projects undertaken either by my uncle or his predecessor, though some things were going straight to the Works’ on-site museum; while it was sad to know that yet another piece of my childhood was soon to vanish, it was nice to know that Uncle Fixit’s work was still highly regarded by his colleagues and successors.

I wasn’t left to roam all alone, but my “guide” had vanished into the recesses of the Garage, possibly to investigate the power failure. A few moments later, a new set of ugly fluorescent lights came on, illuminating the racks filled with Big Exotic Machines and components thereof. “I wish I knew what more of these do,” I said aloud, my voice wistful.

The lights flickered again. “Wonders,” came the unexpected reply in a very familiar voice. When I looked in the direction whence it had come, I saw a spectral form that I immediately recognized as my dead Uncle Fixit.

Uncle Fixit looked at me and smiled sadly. “I poured so much of my heart and soul into these things,” he said gesturing with one insubstantial hand at the rows of varied Big Exotic Machines before us. “Is it any wonder that some part of me might linger here even today?”

I couldn’t have said anything at that point, but I didn’t need to. “No more a wonder than my hanging around as long as I have,” another voice replied. It was the equally spectral form of the man I’d known as the Artificer, the man who’d built the Garage in the first place: Preston Andrews.

He looked exactly as he had the last time I’d seen him: the very image of a mad scientist from a Universal Horror film, or a Republic serial, though he was still missing the giant robot. It was kind of fitting, given that he was a Doctor of SCIENCE! and several other things besides.

I glanced around, certain that we were about to be interrupted by my “guide”, but the Artificer addressed my concern. “He’s using the bathroom, and will be some time about it; he should really watch what he eats better.” I digested that. “Regardless, we have time enough for this.”

He gestured, and I found myself surrounded by the swirly gray mists that meant I was traveling between worlds again…

TO BE CONTINUED


	2. A Special Task

When the mist cleared… it _didn’t_ clear. I was in the middle of a titanic redwood forest, and there was fog all around me; I could tell that it was daytime, but nothing more than that.

There is no other forest like a redwood forest; Steinbeck claimed that no painting or photograph of them could capture their otherworldliness that gives a redwood forest its distinctive feeling. The species name for the redwood, _sempervirens_ , means “always living”, or “evergreen”; they say that the name came from the aura of absolute timelessness in a redwood grove. They can live for almost two thousand years, and can grow almost four hundred feet tall. Fire only helps them; floods can’t get rid of them; even the earthquakes their homeland is known for have left them standing.

There is always a stillness about a redwood forest, but unlike that oppressive air that we say is “as still as Death”, this is “as still as Life”, for, as an author of fairy stories once described his particular Woods, “you could practically hear the trees growing”; the fog only amplified this effect on me. I could have stood there until the light was gone and not counted the time wasted, but unfortunately, I was on a mission (and I could never be so lucky as to have a mission of “watch the trees grow for a day or two”), so I forced myself to examine the area around me for any sign of what precisely my mission was.

I was on a mild slope next to a number of trunks easily wider than my full height; the widest was probably twelve feet across or so. I couldn’t see far enough through the fog to even guess at how tall they were, but I expected they couldn’t be less than two hundred feet at the very shortest.

[A note by the Translators and Editors: The incredible size and stature of the redwoods adorning the Mountain Kingdom should be known well enough to the reader that we did not bother translating the various measures mentioned in the text; suffice it to say that they were mostly mid-sized trees around him.]

There was an oddly light patch on the trunk nearest to me; on approaching it, I found that it was a note that had been left for me, since it was addressed to me by name. It was damp through from the fog and so very fragile, and the ink was starting to run and smear in places, but I managed to decipher most of it.

The most important word in the note jumped out at me at once: Scowrers. Their very name seemed to deface the page. The gist of the message was that the guys who had been slaves under the Big Kahuna until I freed them had wound up here, or rather nearby, a community of miners trading with the Realm to the benefit of both. The Scowrers had cut them off from the rest of the world and were trying to starve them out because, well, the Scowrers hate everybody. I was to drive the Scowrers off and restore communications with the Realm.

So this was the forested mountain I had only been permitted to see from afar when I led the people out from the Bunny Empire, and that does look rather insane when I put it into writing, but it’s what happened.

OK, this didn’t seem too terrible a task, though trying to stop the Scowrers on the Reaving March wouldn’t ever be precisely _easy_ , either. It would probably mean killing their War Witch, and maybe the Big Cheese as well, but if I took them both out as obviously and as decisively as I could, the rest would probably choose to March A-Reaving somewhere else.

Well, that’s what I was hoping would happen, though it didn’t turn out that way at all…

TO BE CONTINUED


	3. The Ancient City in the Depths

As I walked down the slope through the fog, I came upon a series of fairly freshly severed human heads mounted upon pikes in a line. They were, of course, Scowrers the Miners had decapitated and made into a warning sign; obviously, the Miners didn’t know the Scowrers well enough to realize that they would only take this as encouragement.

The main entrance to the Miners’ domain beneath the mountain was a wide boulevard cut into the living rock and extensively decorated with various frescoes, geometric patterns, statements of welcome, and other such. I couldn’t help but notice that these decorations also provided ample camouflage for an observer (perhaps armed with a blowgun or something similar, perhaps not), and the very wide and open passage offered next to no cover for an attacking force, so I figured that the only reason the passage wasn’t packed with dead Scowrers was that the Miners didn’t want to leave them even that much cover for a subsequent assault.

There was a blank wall at the far end of the boulevard; when it was about twenty feet ahead of me, a portcullis swung down behind me. Now, portcullises usually drop straight down through a track, but this one actually swung down towards me like a garage door, slipping over a little notch in the floor that acted as a catch once it had shut.

A voice boomed out from everywhere and nowhere. “Stranger to our mountain! You have two paths from which you may freely choose: down one path lies Death; down the other is Life. Choose wisely.”

I had no time to waste on this, so I held up my right hand, fingers splayed to expose my palm and the brand that was on it which I had received when the Miners’ forebears had accepted me as their guide out of the Bunny Empire. “Here is my choice. Have you forgotten what this means, or am I still welcome amongst those I helped come here?”

A pair of figures jumped out of the walls in the tunnel behind the portcullis. They were dark against the light coming in from the entrance, but I knew that at least one was armed, and that others that I couldn’t see had me in their sights, ready to slay me should I prove false or treacherous.

One of the figures came right up to the grating. “Give me your hand,” a gruff voice demanded, and I obligingly stuck my right hand through the thick portcullis, my palm up.

After a few tense moments of silence, the figure turned back to it fellows and said, “It is the True Mark!”

Almost as soon as he’d said it, the portcullis began to lift straight up. That was interesting, though the two who had come forth from the walls expressed their desire for me to come with them as soon as I could duck under the portcullis, so I was given no time to observe further.

I was taken into a certain section of wall and led down a number of very narrow corridors that switched back and forth a number of times before debouching back into the main boulevard just beyond the wall that now obstructed it; this was obviously another series of defensive measures, and easily laid any questions I had over why the Scowrers were starving these people out (rather than assaulting the mountain until the Miners were all dead) to rest. Such defenses could easily allow ten or twenty defenders to wipe out an entire Reaving March, which is probably what had happened before I showed up.

Once we were on the boulevard again, my escort became quite chatty, quickly bringing me up to speed on the events around and following the founding of the Miners’ domain.

When the Miners had reached the mountain, they’d found this carven entryway and the city to which it led empty and waiting, it seemed, for them. The first generation had lived in the expectation that the original inhabitants would return soon, so they’d taken care to cause as little disturbance as possible in the City itself, instead tunneling out cruder shelters for their own use closer to the actual mines, which still formed the chief dwellings of the Miners, suitably expanded as their numbers increased over the years. Only the bare minimum of the City itself was used, usually as a place for barter with those who sought what the Miners mined, as not a few of the Miners thought that it was under a curse of death for any who dared try to live there.

Now, I had journeyed far from the Realm before, and most of the time a friendly greeting was only essayed in order to put you off your guard. My escort’s chattiness seemed contrived to cover such an eventuality, so after a certain point, I told him, “You know, I really am who I claim to be, rather than a spy or a saboteur from the Scowrers.” I held up my left hand. “If you will allow me, I will produce another set of bona fides.”

A spearpoint or three gently touched my back, just to let me know I was treading on thin ice. After a moment’s pause, my escort replied, “Very well; show me.”

I slowly reached into my breast pocket…

TO BE CONTINUED


	4. The Ancient Depths in the City

I pulled out the Medallion, of course, since the First Protector had instructed me to bear it constantly before he had Alamsta send me back. I had kept it tucked away in my breast pocket since then, as I neither knew nor cared to know what powers it might have (or what it might attract) in my world.

The Medallion was certainly enough to convince my escort that I meant no ill will, whether or not he thought the brand I bore was indeed what he’d called “the True Mark”. Now openly hanging on my chest, the Medallion would certainly also ward me against anything the War Witch (or anyone else) might care to send my way.

The boulevard came to an end at an absolutely amazing city carved into the mountain, but I knew that I would be taken elsewhere to meet the head honcho, and so it was. We took a road along the outer perimeter of the beautiful, quiet, empty city to another, smaller boulevard which was obviously the path to the mines.

Since I’m me, the first thought that came to mind as we walked away from the city was, “Many sink down, and few return to the Sunlit Lands.” Hopefully, I wouldn’t have to fight my way out of here by killing a witch in her own lair, but since this was the world of the Realm, you never knew.

I was brought to a council meeting not terribly unlike the ones I had attended in the Realm Above, a floating land of giants and humans who lived in their walls like mice. I showed them what was left of the message to me that I’d found upon my arrival, the Medallion, and the brand on my palm. These three together were more than enough to convince them that I should be taken seriously.

My first order of business was to gather a party of volunteers to explore the city with me, especially those parts where there might be a tunnel to the surface hiding in plain sight. My second order of business was to actually set forth to explore the city, especially those parts et cetera. I had a feeling that we’d find something to make it worthwhile, but it wasn’t anything like what I was expecting to find.

What we found were four temples and a throne room.

The throne room was the one I’d been shown on the Visualization Engine so long ago; the others confirmed that there was an annual bunny sacrifice where the bunny in question voluntarily hopped forth from the bunny warrens in the New City all the way to the altar in the throne room, where it was slaughtered as it lay still upon the stone. My knowledge of this rite astonished my party, as parts of it that I described were only known to the Innermost Circle. By the time that we reached the altar, they were all completely convinced that I was who I claimed to be.

The message on the altar, addressed to me and each member of my party by name, clinched it. It said there were no other ways up to the surface yet, and that I was to go and have the High Priest sacrifice a bunny in each of the four temples as they usually did here. Once that was done, I was to go out to the Scowrer and try to talk peace with them, or at least harder than I had the last time. It didn’t actually say that last part, but I felt it was implied. Besides, that failure still stung, so I was determined to actually sincerely try to negotiate whatever peace the Scowrers might accept.

I was not ready for what awaited me when I tried…

TO BE CONTINUED


	5. A Protector’s Duty

Have you ever heard of Johnny Appleseed? In case you haven’t, he was an early American frontiersman, missionary, and planter of apple orchards. Time and again, he went into Native American settlements armed only with his Bible and his faith; I hope I don’t need to tell you why his example would come to mind as I walked back out of the Miners’ domain into the sunlight, bound for the assemblage of yurts that formed the Scowrers’ lodgings in this land.

It was pretty surreal, just walking into the nearly empty entry point without so much as a second look in my direction. OK, these were the weirdest bunch of Scowrers that I’d ever seen, and that’s saying something. I went over to the guard by the door to the High Yurt, wherein I should find the Big Cheese, and demanded entry.

The guard blinked at me a few times. “Chill, man; it’s cool. Just bounce in there; he won't mind.”

I took a closer look at the guard’s eyes. Sure enough, he was higher than a kite. I had no idea what he was doped up on, but apparently these Scowrers had found something that would make the time pass more easily. Oh, boy.

I went into the High Yurt and started to choke on the fumes that filled the place. This yurt was high in every possible way, I’ll tell you that much. I wondered if I’d need a gas mask to stay in here any length of time, but the Medallion began to glow in a soft and reassuring way, so I pressed on.

The problem of dealing with a dope fiend when he’s on a bender is that he might talk to you, but he might take the opinion of the creature living in his left sock more seriously than anything you tell him. Given all the pipes I saw around me, I suspected the humble poppy was the prime architect of this band of Scowrers’ lethargy, so delusions of the sort that confounded my attempts at diplomacy were more or less to be expected. I almost expected the Big Cheese to say he was talking to the purple penguin named Bob who tended to visit me in my weirdest dreams, but Bob would have been almost too normal for the state the Big Cheese was in.

With the state the Scowrer camp was in, I could have killed every man, woman and child among them all by myself before anyone knew what I was about. I am not the Assassin, though; I am the Young Protector, and a Protector never slaughters the helpless. Were I to kill these Scowrers, it must needs be on the field of battle.

Sometimes being honorable feels idiotic, but better an honorable idiot than a clever blackguard.

I left the Scowrers to their gong festival and walked up the sloped towards the crest of the mountain. There was a noticeable treeline, by which I mean that the trees and all other vegetation abruptly stopped about one hundred feet from the peak. One hundred lateral feet, that is; the slope past that point was so steep that the redwoods came short of the actual peak itself by a good ways. So yes, the treeline was essentially the base of a cliff.

I don’t know what drove me to go up that crazy slope, but on and on and up and up I went. It took some time, but I finally made it to the very top of the mountain.

The view was tremendous, and rather depressing. I’d led the Miners’ forebears through a desert to get here, but now I could see that the desert utterly surrounded the mountain on all sides, a vast sea of sands that I was surprised a merchant would cross for any reason.

The Scowrers must have recovered while I was working my way up here; I chuckled at the notion that they were coming down while I was going up. Anyway, they were buzzing all around their camp like a bunch of angry bees, which boded ill for the Miners. I suspected they were going to try to take out their ‘hangovers’, or whatever you wanted to call it, on whoever was unfortunate enough to be nearest them.

So maybe I should be nearest them, and pull the blow to myself? The idea was worth considering…

TO BE CONTINUED


	6. Rounds Chambered or Chambers Rounded?

I really had no idea of what I was actually going to do once I diverted the Scowrers from attacking the Miners again, but I figured that it didn’t matter, since every plan I had attempted to put into action recently hadn’t been just DOA, but Dead _Before_ Arrival.

Coming back down the mountain was a much faster affair than the ascent had been, mostly because I found a fairly safe place where I could slide most of the way down without killing myself: the single river that sprang from a spring a little below the summit. It was actually flowing pretty well, so I acquired a generous coating of muck and slime on the way down, but it was the best waterslide I’d ever been on.

Ironically, it was probably that very coating of muck that aided me in attracting the Scowrers’ attention; my taunts at them sealed the deal, and they came after me like hounds after a fox. I certainly expected to be treated like the fox in a hunt should they actually catch me.

I led them around the far side of the mountain, and then up the back slopes, and up, and up. I thought they’d give up once we were all climbing nearly vertical surfaces, but the Scowrers pursuing me were apparently not to be gainsaid so easily. Fortunately, none of them broke away to circle back and attack the Miners while I was taking them to the nosebleed section.

I pulled myself up onto what I’d thought was just another ledge, and there was another cave opening before me, invisible from below. Though it was much smaller than the boulevard below, I could see in the carvings that decorated the passage that it had been made by whoever had originally excavated the city in the heart of the mountain.

The Scowrers were right behind me; I took a moment to weigh the chances that this tunnel offered some kind of access to the city below against whether I thought I could draw the Scowrers off again, and decided that the only way to go was forward. I had to trust that the tablet had been correct when it told me that there were no hidden paths from the surface into the city.

There was light in the tunnel, peeking in from various sources that I couldn’t spare the time to investigate, though I was curious as to what they could be. At any rate, I wasn’t plunging blindly ahead into stygian blackness as I followed the twists and turns the corridor took. I could hear the Scowrers behind me, so I tried to pick my pace up as much as I could, knowing that there was nothing that I could do to so much as slow them down.

The corridor opened out onto a scene from Dante’s Inferno. A vast pit of glowing red liquid which I assumed to be lava from the heat and the smell lit a vast chamber in an ominously bloody shade of crimson; I almost expected there to be chanting cultists or a gargantuan ape lurking in the billowing smoke.

There were a few places nearby for me to crouch in hiding while keeping the entryway under observation; I chose one and began my watch.

The first of the Scowrers to enter the chamber was suitably impressed. “This would make a good place for us to send the meat to feed the Wyrmlings.”

I felt my gorge rise. He was referring to the Scowrers’ despicable practice of human sacrifice: the sacrifices were “the meat” who would “feed the Wyrmlings”, statues of baby dragons whose mouths held the flames the sacrifices were cast into.

After a moment, other Scowrers flooded into the chamber in a seemingly endless stream. I stopped counting after the first two minutes, but by the time they were all inside, I figured that most of their Reaving March must be here.

There was just the one way out that I had seen, and this room, for all its grandeur, couldn’t be terribly stable. If I could find a way to trap the Scowrers or even bring the whole roof down upon them, that would solve everything pretty neatly.

I stealthily moved to the entryway, hoping some method of bringing it down would show itself to me, but the only thing I found was—the War Witch!

The War Witch let out a hideous cackle that alerted all the Scowrers behind me to my presence before beginning a series of clearly ritualized motions that I figured must be meant to put a spell on me. I reached for the Medallion and—

I know you think I’m going to say that the Medallion wasn’t there, but it was; it was just so filthy and slimy that it was hard for me to get a hold on it, so I barely managed to present it to the War Witch before she was finished with her dance. A bright flash of light temporarily blinded me as the War Witch screamed in fury.

Somehow, we blundered around each other until I was in the corridor and the War Witch was in the chamber. The War Witch began an oration in purest gobbledygook which bore a decided resemblance to the oration the Magician had used in his call upon a Power to judge me so many years ago.

I’m sure the War Witch was decidedly not happy with the response she got. “The appointed hour has come at last!” The cry in a resonant basso profundo echoed throughout the chamber just before everything started to crumble around me, so I started running for the exit as fast as my legs would carry me. As I left, I heard the voice continue, “The half-life of my arsenal’s isotopes has rendered most of it worthless, but I still have enough fissile material for a critical mass!”

I made it out in probably only half the time it had taken me to go in, but this time I was being pursued not by a band of fiends, but by a flood of what I still thought was lava. It wasn’t; it was mud infused with radium, though I didn’t find that out until much later on.

I hid under an overhang several dozen feet below the cave mouth and hoped the flood wouldn’t fry to into a cinder, but what happened instead was that when the mountaintop blew off, I was sheltered well enough to survive.

Had I been far enough away to observe safely, I would have seen the all too familiar sight of a mushroom cloud billowing up from the top of the mountain…

TO BE CONTINUED


	7. By Election, by Acclaim, by Proclamation, and by Strength of Arms, King

So the mountain was now more of a really high plateau now, as most of the parts above the treeline had been blown away by the detonation. Numbed, dirty and temporarily deafened, I made my way in a daze to where the Scowrers’ encampment had been; it was ablaze like it had been coated with gasoline.

I was able to hear again by the time I reached the entrance to the boulevard, which had escaped being buried because of a series of channels in the area around it that had been designed to divert avalanches or mudslides away from it. I staggered my way to where the wall blocking the way had been; it had toppled like it was papier-mache instead of rock, and so my path was clear all the way to where the Miners were hiding in terror.

You see, the Miners had been underground all this time, so when the top blew off the mountain, all they knew was that a huge earthquake had just hit, and all their tunnels might be about to collapse because of it, but there was nothing that they could do except hide in the Iron Tubes, a place of refuge they’d created in case of an earthquake. I had to tell them what had happened at least three full times to convince them to open up for me.

I brought a bunch of them who seemed in good enough condition for a fight out to check on the Scowrers’ camp, but, truth be told, we were a pretty punch-drunk lot as we made our way towards the conflagration.

Not nearly all of the Scowrers were dead, though: we ran into quite a few of the women and children the warriors had left behind, but most of them either attacked us and were killed or deliberately killed themselves and their children, a move that shocked the lot of us into stone cold sobriety.

We managed to talk perhaps as many as fifteen girls who had been marked out as “rewards” for Scowrers returning victorious into not offing themselves, and rescued a handful of babies whose parents had perished elsewhere from the raging flames.

The worst part was when we were ambushed by the last three remaining camp guards, who had set up the ambush and set themselves on fire so that we couldn’t strike out at them without igniting ourselves as well. I had to personally put them out of their misery by using the martial arts Melegrethan had taught me in the Camp; I was none too pleased about it, either.

When we got back with our “prisoners” and the news that the Scowrer band would threaten the mountain no more, we found that a crowd had gathered to greet us in the more open corridors of the New City, since the Miners were still leery of going freely into the Old City. Immediately thereafter, a bunch of stuff happened all at once and so fast that I hardly had time to register all of it just then.

Here’s what I pieced together after the fact. First, some of the guys who had gone to the camp with me went to a special session of the Highest of High Councils; I thought at the time that they were going to report our findings officially so I wouldn’t have to. Next, one of the other guys whipped up the crowds in the New City to a frenzy of joyous celebration like I had only seen when VJ Day was announced a few months before I turned four. Then, another guy managed to yell in my ear over the ever increasing noise the crowd was making that pretty soon they’d crown me King.

In hindsight this should have been the first warning bell, but I thought he was being sarcastic, so I replied, “Yeah, I’m really King down here,” but I guess I must have sounded serious in all the hubbub.

The guy then turned to the crowd and yelled out something about whether they wanted to make me King, and the crowd went even wilder. I still wasn’t taking any of this seriously, so I gave back one of those “princess waves” you see celebrities in a parade giving to the audience. Fortunately, I didn’t make any of the other gestures that I might have if I’d realized they weren’t just pulling my leg (like the Italian Salute or some such).

It was when the first guy got back with the news that the council had voted unanimously to make me king that I started to get the idea that maybe they weren’t kidding.

Uh, oh.

I realized then that, in the most technical fashion possible, I had wiped out the Scowrers, which might be akin to a show of arms sufficient to call me the conqueror of the area.

When I tried to make a break for the boulevard, my way was blocked bodily by quite a few of my new (ulp) adoring fans.

I was beginning to think I might have been in less trouble had the Scowrers caught me…

TO BE CONTINUED


	8. Well, That Happened…

I greeted the swirling gray mists of the trip back to the Garage with no small relief, I can tell you.

I mean, I’m as ambitious as the next man, and would probably like to rule my own little kingdom, but seriously? I do almost nothing for a bunch of strangers I’ve just met in a place I’d never been before and they want me to be king?

All I can think is that the Miners got their hands on whatever the Scowrers had been high on when I’d gone and tried to be diplomatic with them.

But that wasn’t so important; I was on my way back to the Garage, where I would finish gathering up the few things I wanted from Uncle Fixit’s place (and yes, that included Otto Maton) and go back to the Realm to meet my coming fate, or something like that.

The shades of Uncle Fixit and Preston Andrews the Artificer were waiting for me when I got back. Uncle Fixit smirked at me and said, “Your Majesty.”

I rolled my eyes. “Don’t _you_ start with that baloney.”

The Artificer snorted. “You wish it’s just baloney; at least that makes for a good sandwich!”

I said something imprudent which reflected how worn out I was, since it was something I’d never say in the ordinary course of events.

Uncle Fixit laughed. “Well, I wanted to see you settled; I got to see you win a kingdom instead, which is pretty okay anyways. I’ll let your folks know you miss them.” Then he vanished.

I said something else that reflected how disappointed and forlorn I felt, another expression that I wouldn’t say in any normal time, but what’s normal when your uncle who you haven’t seen for years because he’s dead goes back wherever he came from?

Doctor Andrews must have agreed, because he didn’t remonstrate with me; at any rate, when he spoke, he brought up another subject completely. “The nuke that leveled the mountain’s peak left a nice plateau for you to plant the local Tree on once you’ve cleaned it up with the Medallion.”

I swear I felt my chin make contact with the Garage floor, my jaw dropped so far. “That was a nuke?”

Doctor Andrews waved his hands dismissively. “Yes, of course, and what set it off was the arsenal’s synthetic mind. The important point is that you’ll have to go back there with an Apple, decontaminate the plateau, and plant the Apple so the Tree can grow from it, and you should probably do so before any of those idiot Miners go up there to gawk at what happened to their mountain and get a bad case of the Curies. Got it?”

I nodded numbly.

Doctor Andrews nodded. “Okay, off you go.”

Almost before he was finished speaking, I was in the Chamber of the Tree. One of the gargantuan Apples hanging next to my head fell into my hands with a decisive plop, and a second later, I was on the newly nuked plateau, the Medallion on my chest glowing softly.

I really felt like a fool for what I was about to do, but I did it any way. I held out the Medallion and opened my mouth to say what I thought it ought to do, only to find that the Medallion was already doing it, thank you very much. A weird glittery mist seemed to rise up from the bare ground and slowly float its way higher and higher until it had vanished.

So, phase one was sorted; on to phase two. I slowly walked across the uneven and jagged ground until I reached the very center to the plateau. A small patch of soil had somehow decided it would drop into place right there so that I could plant the Apple and it wouldn’t wither away, but would form its own Tree. Anyhow, the Apple got planted and I was immediately whisked back to the Garage, just in time for my guide to return from his bathroom break.

I had a sneaking suspicion that I would have to return to the Miners’ domain, but that would be part of another story.

THUS ENDS

King Under the Mountain

Being the Eighteenth Tale of the Coin, the Sword and the Medallion

THE STORY CONTINUES WITH

Raiders of the Tossed Mark

Being the Nineteenth Tale of the Coin, the Sword and the Medallion


End file.
